THIS INVENTION relates to an improved sugar cane harvester.
Because of the high capital cost of most present day cane harvesters, and also other equipment used during harvesting operations, it is common for cane farmers to form themselves into groups for the efficient harvesting of their cane crops.
A well-known type of cane harvester of self-propelled type has a forwardly extending boom carrying a driven rotary pre-topper which is vertically adjustable, for severing the tops of the cane as the harvester advances, a pair of counter-rotated screw-type crop lifters on the harvester then passing to both sides of the row of cane, picking up fallen stalks, the cane then being cut at or near to ground level by a base cutter. The stalks are pushed over forwards so that they can be conveyed, butt-ends first, through the harvester by a train of feed rollers, which feed the stalks continuously to a rotary chopping cutter, which chops them into billets. The chopping cutter of such a machine has two counter-rotated shafts, one above the other, each with diametrically opposed blades, corresponding blades of the two shafts cutting into the cane from opposite sides without interrupting the passage of the cane through the machine, the blades meeting, or almost meeting, in a plane through the two shafts. The billets are received by an elevator, which can be swung about a vertical axis to discharge the elevated cane to either side of the rear of the harvester, the discharged cane being received in a bin of a cane transporter travelling to one side of the rear of the harvester. When the bin is filled, the transporter is driven away (being replaced by another) to a farm rail siding where its contents are discharged into one or more of a train of wheel-mounted mill bins, which are subsequently hauled to a sugar mill. A harvesting operation, then, requires a team of a harvester operator, and two, or three, haul-out drivers, and involves the considerable capital cost of two or three transporters in addition to the harvester, which is usually very large and expensive.
The billets produced by a cane harvester of this type are commonly used for planting, and it is necessary that the billets for this purpose should not have been unduly damaged during the harvesting operation.
Many farmers would prefer to harvest their own cane provided that suitable harvesters were available to them. For a farmer to harvest his own cane economically, the operation of the harvester and the transfer of harvested chopped cane to the farm siding should be handled by the one man. Since the burning of cane before harvesting is very difficult for a farmer without a crew to assist him, the harvester should preferably be capable of harvesting green cane efficiently, and moreover it should be capable of harvesting cane even if lodged and tangled, and also stand-over cane. The harvester should also be capable of delivering high quality undamaged cane billets required for automatic billet-cane planting machines.
The present invention has been devised with the object of providing a sugar cane harvester which will meet these criteria, and thus will be very well suited to the efficient and low-cost harvesting of sugar cane.